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Author: Jh

Every year, people will compare the Nexus / Pixel hardware specs leaks and put it against other recent / flagship phones from Samsung and rest.
So let’s look back at the Google Pixel 2 / XL and see what was even special about it that was touted by Google at the actual launch
– Processor – standard top end. not special but ok.
– Screen – OLED and LCD. top end but apparently could be better as LG panels weren’t that good yet
– RAM – so so, not the highest, just under.
– Camera – touted. hardware supposedly better to work better with less cameras required. But software was heavily touted with enhanced portrait mode, enhanced HDR, motion pics.
– Squeezable Edge – rather gimmicky. not a clear diffentiator – Samsung-esque lame
– ARCore – AR stickers
– Google Lens – early release
– Free photo storage – 2 years free Google Photos
– auto song recognition

So do any of that make it worth it?? Hardware wise – I don’t think it was super better than any other top phone. But then, that’s it isn’t it, it depends on what China can produce for everyone.

Software wise – ARCore was ok but not life changing, it was fun to play with and show off but did’t go viral, Google Lens was fun but not viral either, Free photo storage is super appreciated but apparently not enough to sway the Samsungnites and Apples, processor and screen meh, camera quality great but not enough to sway too? song recognition is super fun.

So what else would still make the Pixel different from other phones?
– more better software like the camera and AR stuff? is it worth $100 more each?
– more free photo storage? – is this worth the maybe USD200 (estimate 1 TB used x 2 years)
– more early google apps and services? – for early adopters and nerds

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Pixel is the ultimate phone if you’re not into pure google services. But the hardware is just table stakes and the software/apps and support is the icing that is the differentiator.

So it’s to be expected that the Pixel 3 XL leaks seem meh.

How do I still like my Pixel 2 XL?
– still too big, if only they sold the Pixel 2 in Singapore with warranty I would have chosen that
– performance – super good
– headphone jack – still super annoying
– physical state – still super good
– the small gimmicky stuff – usually all v fun to me. not really tangibles but worth the fun.
Worth it compared to other phones?
– about $100-$200 too expensive otherwise a confirm recommend to anyone.
What other normal ppl need
– something cheaper, yet secure, yet reliable
– less frills, more dependency, security and reliability.
What the instagrammers need
– nothing, they can go buy iphones just because they can’t be seen without one

What they need to push in services
– much better music streaming service with cheaper price, global availability
– a serious Google One service with proper perks, support, branding, marketing and benefits
– monetize the storage pricing and provide more services and branding to this
– put Google Photos front and center and integrate more
– same for Maps
– forget about RCS messaging
– exclusive integrations for only Pixels, otherwise all phones are getting the same Google apps what’s the point

Microsoft – I believe they have high adoption of Office 365, especially email and office suite. Due to ease of transition from Outlook and On-premise Exchange, due to need for Office apps, due to ease of management of Office licenses, AD integration. 2. Azure platform hosts of IAAS services. 3. Dynamics suite of products moving towards cloud host Dyn365 which counts more under cloud revenue than pure software.

AWS – lots of new age companies all started off on AWS and growing. It takes up a big growing new-age pie, especially of nascent cloud industry obviously. Doesn’t mean that it will stay biggest, but it’s a big headstart in this space and grows. Obviously they have the scale and infra to support it.

GCP – Frown. New. Small. 10%? Lack of a super strong differentiator or draw. Biggest input right now – in the enterprise space – AI/ML features, huge data ingestion and manipulation, cheaper prices. Basic IAAS – cheaper but not easy to adopt as no Active Directory, no legacy apps that can directly “upgrade” to GCP cloud version. Gsuite – still can’t compete fast enough with Office apps, unfortunately, it seriously needs to improve, and faster. AI/ML is great, but hard to adopt, too hard still. K8s is great, but also hard to adopt, and only suitable for huge web scale companies and new fancy apps. Overall Google services tend to be so far ahead of the curve that it’s hard for traditional migration but good if you have a Silicon Valley budget for a new age service.

So, cloud services is huge in that it is lumping together so many areas like IAAS, SAAS. Very different competitors in each segment, sometimes there are links and interdependency. Can’t just compare totally as a whole. So, to invest into IAAS, SAAS, or services? All three growing and maturing problably at different paces over the next decade. All will survive well for time to come. Nobody has time for everything!

Well, actually not cars, but transport in general. I guess I’ve had a fair bit of time to think about transport, even if I’m not in the transport field (public transport, private, car industry, transportation industry, anything), maybe just a layman thoughts.

I dislike cars, for a long time. Since, a long time. I resisted taking driving lessons – my parents almost forced me too, after a lot of badgering. I didn’t want to take driving lessons because I felt it was an expensive waste of money (driving lessons and testing in SG isn’t cheap), because I thought driving in the city is lame, because I prefer taking public transport (habit? foolishness?), because I don’t have a car, because cars are expensive (they always say), because I didn’t enjoy driving, because I don’t have a value system where I feel good because I can drive.

But I got my license, eventually. It wasn’t like super flying colors or anything but it sufficed. I can drive well enough, I am comfortable driving, I can navigate, I know most of the roads here (I also always used to navigate from a physical map while my father drove).

I’ve driven some amounts in a few countries while travelling. It was ok. Not particularly enjoyable still, but it suffices for getting around.
I’ve driven some amounts in SG, it’s useful when things need to get done.

I still dislike driving! Even getting past the initial difficulty, and being technically competent, I still don’t like it!

But I think I am too rational, that I am too aware of the risks of the road – errant drivers, inattentive drivers, drivers straying off their line, drivers cutting into other paths, drivers driving distracted on the phone, mechanical failures, human failures. I lament driving for the risks of the road, for the need for me to keep paying attention, for wanting myself to be as physically fit and alert when driving. I lament the need to maintain a physical machine with oil, gears, batteries, steel, rubber. I lament the need to wait for traffic lights, parking, for the aircon to cool down the car, etc.

Driving and owning a car is merely trading one set of inconveniences (of public transport), with another (of maintaining a vehicle). At some point, each makes more sense.

Which brings me to my perpetual headache of car ownership vs public transport and how it’s all still such a huge mess.

Problem
– It is difficult to drop private transport until it can be totally and wholly replaced by public transport, in a better way.
– Specific use cases that are strongly better with a private car, will keep people anchored to their cars.
– Owning and investing in a private car will trigger increased usage of the private vehicle even when not absolutely necessary. Because sunk costs “it’s already paid for”, and because just-in-case “what if I need my car”

If fixed costs are a high %, then people will likely opt to keep using it, otherwise they are “wasting” the fixed costs invested in, and which is depreciating in a fixed manner regardless of use.
Hence costs need to be more strongly shifted over to variable costs if we want to encourage flexible usage.
Fixed costs are already paid, even if person opts to use public transport – in this case you would end up “double paying”, which doesn’t make sense. Unless public transport is still less than variable costs. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But one shouldn’t have to keep making these choices! Public transport should and must always be cheaper and better! That’s the government’s responsibility!

But frankly, the ultimate calculation is in time value costs. How much is your time worth? How much does it bring value to you to save that 15 mins, 1 hour of your life, allowing you to do other things in the limited lifespan?

How then do we get out of this vicious cycle?
Free public transport if you already own a car? – doesn’t make sense
Bundle public transport costs into private vehicle ownership? – could work but high costs!
Free public transport for all? – unfair for those who do not travel? high govt costs? abuse?

It’s not easy to disrupt the equilibrium the world has found. All the infrastructure, policies, habits are all crafted and moulded around the current balance of private-public transport. Ride sharing, Uber, shared bikes, shared escooters are all disrupting it, but not sufficiently yet. A better taxi booking system does not a revolution make.

I’m glad to say that I already have the base infrastructure hardware connectivity down pat, already fully working and fully underutilised. It’s quite a feat when my TV utilises two network ports, one for direct TV streaming and one for Chromecast. Because latency is one of the worst culprits of “slow” feeling once you go past a few Mbps of internet access. Also HD movie and video streaming. Or rather browsing, which is worse as it doesn’t get to buffer sufficiently.

full switched network

distributed WAP direct to switch

local DNS forwarder

single SSID network

local media server

minecraft host, nas host, plex host, etc.

Things I would wish for that would be so awesome:

local internet cache

local Google services cache of gDrive, gPhotos, gMaps. I mean, I don’t need a public 10 Terabyte POP, but just my own files would be fun. Loading all your gphotos from Jurong isn’t the most fun, even if your processor and bandwidth can keep up. (looking forward to 10 years in the future. >10gbps bandwidth and <5ms latency?

There’s a surprisingly strong amount of suspicion, and wariness in the US/Silicon Valley towards the tech giants Facebook, Google, and other internet advertising companies. It’s way more than an outsider would expect. Firstly it’s already higher in US than other countries, and then again within the Silicon Valley-type, it’s even more intense.

As someone who just loves to the utility that Google products provided, it was quite confusing. Are these people just worked up over nothing? Are they competitors? Do they hate Google and Facebook because these two juggernauts are at competition with everyone else (eg Yelp)? Are Americans and Californian social justice warriors (SJW) just that into the entire privacy thing like they are into all kinds of bizarre activism that the rest of the world doesn’t really care as much about. Examples include US racial issues, marijuana usage, LGBT issues, and more.

I honestly still feel like amongst so many companies, at least Google keeps itself in check, and does more right than wrong. Compared to other companies. They have one important luxury – that of a good and high revenue and profit where they can choose to do the right thing, instead of prioritising profits. Example recent case in point – giving up Pentagon AI contracts to preserve their moral identity and continue to attract AI and engineering talent. It’s hard to take the moral high horse if you’re a startup trying to make every dollar it can, or if you’re in an average company who needs to be concerned about year to year revenue – ie the normal world that isn’t top 10 SV unicorns.

One of the greatest fears lately has always been people wondering if your phone is spying on you, whether the presence of people discussing a particular topic lead to the sudden appearance of related ads in your Facebook or ad pages even if you didn’t type it in. A lot of that is probably confirmation bias, but I pretty much guess now that it is the close geographic proximity (via location history) of you and your counterparts, and them doing the recent searches on their devices, that leads ad targeting to also suggest the same items to you. Nobody directly recorded your conversation (as wild a guess it is, I feel it’s way too much of an overstep for them to do it, too inefficient to record and parse everything), but it kind of seemed like it.

GDPR has the world in a mess, and the EU keeps dolling out fines and weird judgements. What will the advertising future look like? Would we ever go back to the straight up less-differentiated ads like print newspapers and tv channels? It was definitely also partly targeted, but less apparent, way less specific. But it didn’t require so much cookies and tracking over platforms.
No matter what, ads remain the most viable method of survival. You, me, anyone can’t keep paying subscription fees per source that we consume from. Over 100 news sources, over 100 applications are used in our lives, it’s economically impossible to subscribe to them all. And yet it’s odd because the marketing ad budget must have come from the things we pay for. So in a way we are still paying for the ad spend. Remember marketing costs go directly into the cost of goods sold to you. Less marketing = more value to you, usually.

It’s been years since Google I/O has been so impressive. Not since the parachuting Google Glass stunt has the new Google really truly surprised everyone. The in-betweens were all smaller iterations of Google products, tweaking through the Android versions, Google messaging apps, and slowly building basic machine-learning termed AI into their apps. Even all the recent AI push has all manifested as machine-learned models simplified down to single functions done well – ie smart identification in photos.

IO18 was a stunner. https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=34m58s
Nobody anticipated Google showing off this incredible demo of a Google Assistant triggered Google Duplex voice call to real humans, and holding a full call conversation, so smoothly, intelligently and realistically. None of the journalists knew, none of the fans knew, and it seemed like even the Silicon Valley people working on AI did not see this coming – that is how far ahead of all other announcements this is. All other companies are working on machine learning bits, just trying to optimize large data sets, and these guys literally blew everyone out the water on so many fronts.
1. How smooth the voice sounds – even current Google Assistant on Google Home is nowhere near. And sheesh they only just announced basic improvements like 6 more voices, continued actions stringing multiple commands. If your GA is so advanced, why are we only getting such simple options. It’s like us here using language talking to a 2 year old and over there is a 6 year old hiding behind.
2. How smooth the conversation is – contextually it is pretty darn coherent. Especially considering it wasn’t a basic simple idea conversation flow but rather with some jumping, clarification, repeats, etc. Does this mean they mastered the basic flow long ago? How long ago?
3. How long the conversation – all we have with GA right now is like a 2-3 sentences max, and Google touts how good their GA is at contextual compared to Alexa. And yes GA is super good at it compared to Alexa and Siri and Cortana. So where did this beast of a full conversation come from? It’s 10 times longer, and that’s exponentially harder.
4. How realistically it mimics humans – in the (fake) pauses, non-word sounds, acknowledgements, intonation.
5. Comprehension of the human responses – the heavy accents, incomplete sentences. Wow why do we still need to talk to GA like a baby.

It is So Good that the reactions to the demo aren’t even about which portion it did well – it did everything so darn well – that the comments are whether it is a good thing to have and whether it needs to declare in advance that it’s a computer.

It deserves a standing ovation for the sheer accomplishment, and also audacity to show this to such a large audience.

Amazon and Microsoft only just announced basic ability to share commands with each other. Fairly straightforward computer API calling. Siri is dead silent. GA is just running it’s own race now.

There are some really good comments on it:
In response to “GA needs to start the call by saying it is GA”, and “We should make AI sound different from humans” or “voice assistant should stick to sounding like a computer”, these are like such standard instinctive human responses to overwhelming new technology.
And then someone said if humans get so dependent on the above cues, would you realize if a rogue AI drops the declaration? And then what even if you create an “AI accent”, it is only going to trend and people / hippies / kids will just adopt the new fangled AI accent.
And what would you do after that?
Trying to stop something artificially or regulate it, will just trigger other disrupters, hackers, etc.

Whatever it is, a new front has been revealed, like when Boston Dynamics showed off their walking running jumping cartwheeling bots.

When these people said AI is their new focus and is the future of Google, they already knew this, long ago.

But maybe small talk has a purpose. The urban theorist (and hyper-observer of the city) Jane Jacobs thought that all these dumb interactions were the social fabric. She wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street.

After Jacobs published her book in 1961, most American cities suburbanized, cutting people off from this kind of casual contact with the people around them. But at the same time, they connected through other means, the telephone primary among them.

Already, the push-button service framework, Uber for everything, has eroded this last bastion of local chitchat. Google Duplex will simply extend that trend even to those businesses who have not given in to the computerization of their reservation systems. And I don’t except myself from this trend: I hate making these little phone calls as much as anyone else.

But if Jacobs is right that simply making conversation with our fellow human beings—“most of it associated with errands”—is what generates trust in the world around us, then what happens when no one is ever quite sure if Alexis or Duplexis is calling?

Having spent more time in old-style Singapore HDB neighbourhoods over the past 2 years, going more to the small shops, kopitiams, sub neighbourhood centres, it’s been a homecoming from 10 years of mainly shopping malls? For a period I was mainly interacting with large neighbourhood malls and central shopping districts. It was kindof fresh to go to wet markets, brick and mortar shops. It was cheaper, more friendly, less refined, less upscale, more casual, more interactive, less predictable, less reliable, less convenient, more authentic. yeah. But I’ve also done alot more online shopping hah.

But I find that the value applies more to food outlets than other shops.

Kurt Vonnegut – buying an envelope
Anyway, I take my pages and I have this thing made out of steel, it’s called a paper clip, and I put my pages together, being careful to number them, too, of course. So I go downstairs, to take off, and I pass my wife, the photo journalist Jill Krementz, who was bloody high tech then, and is even higher tech now. She calls out, “Where are you going?” Her favorite reading when she was a girl was Nancy Drew mysteries, you know, the girl detective. So she can’t help but ask, “Where are you going?” And I say, “I am going out to get an envelope.” And she says, “Well, you’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.”

So I go down the steps, and this is on 48th Street in New York City between Second Avenue and Third, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. And I know their stock very well, and so I get an envelope, a manila envelope. It is as though whoever made that envelope knew what size of paper I’m using. I get in line because there are people buying lottery tickets, candy, and that sort of thing, and I chat with them. I say, “Do you know anybody who ever won anything in the lottery?” And, “What happened to your foot?”

Finally I get up to the head of the line. The people who own this store are Hindus. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes. Now isn’t that worth the trip? I ask her, “Have there been any big lottery winners lately?” Then I pay for the envelope. I take my manuscript and I put it inside. The envelope has two little metal prongs for going through a hole in the flap. For those of you who have never seen one, there are two ways of closing a manila envelope. I use both of them. First I lick the mucilage—it’s kind of sexy. I put the little thin metal diddle through the hole—I never did know what they call them. Then I glue the flap down.

I go next to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and Second Avenue. This is very close to the United Nations, so there are all these funny-looking people there from all over the world. I go in there and we are lined up again. I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. She doesn’t know it. My wife knows it. I am not about to do anything about it. She is so nice. All I have ever seen of her is from the waist up because she is always behind the counter. But every day she will do something with herself above her waist to cheer us up. Sometimes her hair will be all frizzy. Sometimes she will have ironed it flat. One day she was wearing black lipstick. This is all so exciting and so generous of her, just to cheer us all up, people from all over the world.

So I wait in line, and I say, “Hey what was that language you were talking? Was it Urdu?” I have nice chats. Sometimes not. There is also, “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to your little tinhorn dictatorship where you came from?” One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, finally I get up to the head of the line. I don’t reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker-faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating. And I give her the envelope, and she weighs it, because I want to put the right number of stamps on it, and have her okay it. If she says that’s the right number of stamps and cancels it, that’s it. They can’t send it back to me. I get the right stamps and I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock.

Then I go outside and there is a mailbox. And I feed the pages to the giant blue bullfrog. And it says, “Ribbit.”

And I go home. And I have had one hell of a good time.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.

This is super entertaining. I like how the author is described as “black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination”.

But maybe it’s just a metric ton of accumulated small decisions and yes/no reflexes.

My worry is that I wouldn’t live to see the next leap of technology to something far far more advanced and magical. AI/ML is pretty nice that even when designing it, you can’t really explain how the ML algorithm works, it’s supposedly not like a yes/no code, but basically it kinda makes the same decision trees? just in vastly higher numbers.

How many years before it actually reaches Singapore? Given our astronomical car cost, theoretically we should easily be able to pay for self driving or high tech electric cars compared to countries where average car price is 10-20k.

remember when Sat Nav was like futuristic, and then when smartphone map apps were futuristic? hell I remember when I first managed to get GPS on my Nokia – it was SLOW, and painful and small.

tl;dr this long post goes into specifics of (1) how to fully delete all photos from Google Photos storage, and (2) how to re-upload your photos to take advantage of Pixel free storage tier.

Read this if you

are an advanced user,

use Google Photos,

don’t want to pay for extra Google Storage,

want to download all your photos,

or want to delete all your photos.

and want to re-upload everything via a Google Pixel phone.

The simple way

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty or get into complicated settings, I strongly recommend you upgrade to a higher tier Google Drive storage. Go to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage and select the 100 Gb or 1 Tb storage options. They are very good and you get to upload a ton of files for backup, sharing and collaboration. I feel that Google storage tiers are way more worth it than iCloud or Dropbox storage. Please use this. Also, safe and secure backup for your most important documents is way better than what most home users are able to do at home.

Google Pixel’s free photo storage
So I have a new Google Pixel 2 phone, which is absolutely awesome and I would highly recommend to everybody. This phone comes with free unlimited Original quality Google Photos storage to encourage you to take advantage of the super awesome camera. Standard tier by Google only offers free High Quality storage which means the image file is compressed and resized by their special algorithm. If you are a photogeek and love your original files dearly, you would want to avoid this. Although I will also recommend turning on the standard High Quality storage for all your family members if they do not have any other storage or backup available. It is a lifesaver for people who lose their phones or break their phones. The only reason ever to disable this is if you know it is a totally disposable phone or they have bandwidth/wifi issues. Otherwise, backup always on.

Photos from other sources
One interesting thing about the Pixel free storage is that any photos/videos uploaded through the Pixel phone is considered as eligible. This means that photo doesn’t have to be taken by the Pixel. It can be via your DSLR/hand held camera/other phones/previous phones etc etc. What if you have a ton of photos uploaded previously via other phones or uploaded via the web? They will still count as paid storage, unless…

So my plan is to download all my photo/video files out of Google Photos, and then reupload them via my Pixel phone. Fairly simple in theory, but rather tedious by hand, with caveats. I can understand why Google wouldn’t want to make this too easy with just a click of a button, but I guess the extra work I put into it is a fair sacrifice for this policy loophole they have left in place. Thanks Google. And really, the free storage is worth a fair bit of money as you’ll never get this with Apple or Dropbox. Google Photos is fully backed up, redundant storage, global fast availability, plus AI/ML features.

I will now explain through the steps to take, and things to watch out for. Depending on the amount of files you have, your timing and effort will vary considerably.

Step 1. Check current storage:
Go to https://drive.google.com/settings/storage
Log in under your Google account and see how much Total Storage you used. If you have plenty of free space, you might want to skip this whole exercise. Again, this is an advanced class.

Click on View Details. You will see a breakdown of Drive, Gmail and Photos storage. That’s as much information as you’ll get. Drive storage is Google Drives files, you can manage that from drive.google.com, Gmail storage are your email files, you can trim your emails if need be. Finally Google Photos storage shows the number are we are looking for here. I started out with 130 Gigabytes used by Google Photos, which is way over the usual free 15 Gb for normal Google accounts.

(note that my final downloaded amount was higher than what was shown in storage used. I believe that’s due to extra files that were stored for free and didn’t count towards storage.)

Step 2. Download all your photos

We have to retrieve the original sized files, in order to re-upload them. There are some ways to do this.

Option A. Use Google Takeout https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1
This is a fairly convenient way that Google created to allow people to take out all their info if they want to leave Google services forever.

I had problems with it

Click “Select None”

Choose “Google Photos”

Choose “All Albums”

Go down to the bottom, click “Next”

Click through the options – you can usually leave it to defaults
(If you know what you are doing, you might want to select larger file sizes if your computer can manage it, makes it a bit easier to work with. I had almost 20 x 10Gb files.)

Option B. Use Google Drive

Under Google Drive, you can select to enable to show the Photos shortcut. This enables you to see your Google Photos files inside Drive. It’s sorted by year, but not much more is visible. But it is sufficient to run downloads.

I selected one year at a time, and ran the download. I actually found this method better than using Takeout as I get more manageable files for this purpose. For huge years, I selected 3 months at a time to make the files smaller. Note that it splits into 2gb files by default, you cannot change this.

I still kept both Takeout and Drive downloads as I was afraid of losing files. Make sure to have sufficient hard disk space to do all this. If you had to choose one, I would go with Drive download. Make sure all the years are showing up though.

Option C. Use web photos

You should be able to select entire months for download. I had 11 years worth to download, so I did not want to select 11*12 times, I prefer to use Option B.

Step 3. Delete all current files on Google Photos.

Option A. Delete via Drive

Some people suggest deleting it via Drive. That did not seem to work for me. While the folders seem to disappear, the photos still keep showing up both on photos.google.com and on my Android app. Not Recommended.

Option B. Delete on web photos.google.com

In the web, there’s no super shortcut to do this, but some people suggest click-n-drag to select all photos and delete. You can do this to a certain extent – probably to hundreds or something, but it wasn’t good enough for me. It could not handle 1000s or 5000s reliably. Not Recommended.

Option C. On web.

You can also select Full Days at a time. While browsing the photos, click on the date field and it will show a selector. This is a good way to delete Entire Days.

Option D. On Android App.

On the app, you can do a few things: select days, ‘click n drag’, and also select full months. Unfortunately you cannot select full years, but selecting full months works well for me. Caveat: if you have huge months with eg 2000 photos from a trip, it won’t seem to delete fully. This is either due to caching or trash size limit or cap of 500 photos per delete or something else.

To get around this, I find it more reliable to use option C’s deletion of entire days to be better for heavy days. Overall I used a mix of C and D to fully clear all my photos. Keep emptying the trash / recycle bin as well. It takes hours to do this for 11 years worth of photos. Oh Google why do you do this to people.

It’s kind of rare you would ever want to fully delete all your precious photos though.

Step 4. Check

After deleting all the photos you see, return to Step 1 and check that your storage usage has reduced – the photos portion at least. See if it is showing 0 Gb used.

For me, there were still remaining files. I left it overnight to see if the servers were still syncing, but it was still there next morning. I really do not see any more photos under web or Android app. I concluded that the remaining images must be from Google Maps Review contributions or Google Maps Local Guides contributions or Google StreetView contributions. Depending on how you do the upload, these might ‘cost’ you real storage. (If you want to get really into this, go to the Local Guides forums where they will explain to you in excruciating detail).

So what do I do? I didn’t want to remove those photos, even if I wanted, it’s too tedious. The easiest way to do this is to ask Google Photos to compress all your existing remaining media into free High Quality version. That’s plenty good enough for free contributions that I’m not paid for. To do this, go to web/android Google Photos and find the compress function. It will convert all original full sized images into free storage images. It took 2-3 hours for me, and it was a long time before my storage showed a decreasing amount. Check back after awhile and it should now show that Google Photos is using 0 Gb of storage. Note that this is a one-time thing, it should not affect future uploads. Future uploads are determined by the upload quality and you should use Original Quality for Pixel uploads.

Step 5. Re-upload all your photos

Here’s another tedious bit with multiple steps. This takes a lot of time too.

5A. Expand/Extract/Unzip your downloaded files.

5B. Copy them onto your Pixel phone, into the DCIM folder. You can use Windows Explorer. (if you’re more advanced you can use ADB to do this. “adb push origin destination works” well)

You can probably copy them into other folders too, if you wish. I actually created DCIM\Upload in order to not confuse them with newer photos in DCIM\Camera

I recommend you copy like 10 to 20 Gb max at a time, let the phone digest it, upload it, then remove it and copy the next batch. Too many and Photos will strain. Try to limit it to 2000 items too. The upload speed isn’t terribly fast, I recommend leaving a batch of 2-3000 photos overnight to upload, on unlimited home wifi so you don’t get a hefty bill or drained battery.

5C. Let it scan

The reason is that when Google Photos see a huge new batch of files, it will immediately get to work by scanning all the new files, indexing it, checking which files are already backed up, preparing for upload, and then starting the upload. You can see this in the status bar on the top of the photo stream. It’s not as super charged as the web uploader, or the desktop backup uploader. After all, this is designed to run on the phone and not kill your mobile data or battery. So don’t overload it or it will likely hang. I tried a batch of 10,000 photos, with some duplicated folders, and maxed out my phone storage. It didn’t run. I had to delete and redo.

(Edit: I recommend batches of 1000 to 2000 photos at a time, which I feel is a reasonable amount for a Pixel 2 XL. I had success up to 4-6000 photos, but it took really really long to parse and upload (~12 hours or more), which was quite disturbing. )

If you’re unsure or stuck, you can Clear Data on the photos app. This helps a bit, but avoid doing this too much it takes a lot of time to re-cache.

5D. Wait till gphotos app shows backup completed

5E. Run Google Photos Android app > “Free up my storage”. This will help you to clear off files quickly.

5F. Checked for missed files.

I discovered there were some files left over after the “free up my storage”, and I wasn’t sure whether there were uploaded successfully. Simplest way for me is to move them into another separate folder, which triggers their auto upload again.

5G. Delete remaining files and folders as required.

5H. Repeat next batch

So the routine is:

Select batch 1 folders > Transfer to Pixel > Let it scan and upload > Wait until it shows Backup complete > Run Google Photos “Free up my storage” > and then check for files that did not upload. > Delete completed files or folder as necessary > repeat next batch.

Done

After this, you should have 0 Gb used in Photos, as long as all future images go through the Pixel phone. I expect this will take me 1 week to complete the whole exercise. Make sure you have a lot of unlimited high bandwidth wifi to do this.

Edit: It took me about 2 weeks from start to end, doing all the above steps in part each day. It might be faster for you if you didn’t have to redo some wrong steps like I did, or if your files are fewer. If your storage space is running out soon, you might want to start early. If your gdrive space is 100% filled, you might have difficulty receiving emails.

You’ll probably need to redo your albums, and sort out your new old files after all the re-uploading. You will receive a huge amount of auto-awesome creations – do turn off gphotos notifications otherwise you’ll be spammed.

Extra tip, you can turn off wifi on your phone while you are copying files from PC to phone, that will stop gphotos from trying to upload immediately. I don’t like the phone processor and file storage trying to do two heavy tasks at the same time.

The book is set in north Scotland; this is what I imagine of the landscape, a cold hazy little township with rolling greens, hills, etc etc. A corner of the country that kids grew up in, played together, fought together, drank together, and experienced so little yet so much. Slow quiet conversations, slow quiet sentences, some drunken revelry, some young relationships. ‘Tender’ was the word one of the reviewers used, and I gently agreed with that – Iain Banks (non-M) has this tender streak, yet mixed with a huge dose of illicitness and wildness, a type of raw wildness that you’d find in Scotland’s northern shores and weather. Haven’t read like this in awhile. Still prefer his Culture novels of course, but this is nice too.